One way to approach the subject of writing and law in classical Athens would be from the standpoint of legal theory. One might begin, for example, with the famous contrast, invoked by Antigone in Sophocles' play (450–70), between a ruler's pronouncements and the unwritten, unchanging, timeless divine laws. One could then turn to the resolution adopted by the Athenians during the law reform after the end of the Peloponnesian War, which provided that magistrates could only enforce laws that had been inscribed (Andocides 1.85–9). Significantly, Andocides treats this prescription as a legal principle (to use a modern term) to which the Athenians resolved to bind themselves. Other principles entailed that laws should be universal in application and not applied to individuals and that no decree of the Assembly or Council was to override a law. Thus, while acknowledging the central importance of fixed, written laws as an anchor of democratic government, the Athenians were by no means bewitched by the notion of law as eternal, divinely mandated, or immutable – beliefs that are familiar from a variety of other legal cultures.

In the Laws, Plato tries desperately hard to secure for the law code of his hypothetical city an immutability based on divine mandate, but his very effort to construct a tradition of reverence and permanence for the written code reveals his awareness of contrary dispositions in contemporary Athens.